Family:Joseph Marshall and Sarah Unknown (1)

This family is beset by discrepancies between the various versions of the Luton parish registers which survive. Here are all the Marshall baptisms and burials from Luton between 1718 and 1730:

Clearly there was at least one family for which the clerks at Luton were prone to call the father Josiah, Joseph or Simon and the mother Mary or Sarah. It is assumed that despite these discrepancies they were in fact all one family, having six children - Josiah (baptised at neighbouring Kimpton so not in the table above), John, Simon, William, Sarah and another William. The gaps between the children are consistent with there only being one family.

No plausible marriage has yet been found for Joseph / Josiah / Simon and Sarah / Mary. In terms of timing, a slim possibility is that they are Joseph Marshall and Sarah Girdler, who married on 28th November 1715 at Barton on Humber in Lincolnshire - but this is highly unlikely given that Barton on Humber is about 150 miles away.

Barton on Humber (St Mary) parish register: 1715: Joseph Marshall & Sarah Girdler of Winterton were Married November 28th

They are almost certainly not the Joseph Marshall and Sarah Norris who married at Great Woolstone in Buckinghamshire on Christmas Day 1709: the transcript of the Great Woolstone registers held at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies records that Joseph as "Joseph Marshall, of Moulsow" and there are a number of children baptised at Moulsoe to Joseph and Sarah Marshall across the period when this Joseph and Sarah were clearly living in Luton.